India has "good control" over stressed loans at state-owned banks and will ensure lenders are well-capitalised, junior finance minister Jayant Sinha said on Friday.
Speaking as senior officials from the banks, the Reserve Bank of India and the finance ministry held an annual meeting, Sinha said the government would allocate capital based on the banks' capital-adequacy ratios, performance and credit growth.
"We will provide more as necessary to ensure that our banks are well-capitalised," he told reporters.
"As far as the set of stressed assets is concerned, as far as the NPA (non-performing assets) situation is concerned, that we think we now have very good control over and of course (we are) working very closely with the RBI."
Some critics accused the government of skimping on a bailout for the ailing state banks after Finance Minister Arun Jaitley did not announce additional funding in his Feb. 29 budget.
He stuck to plans to provide state banks with 250 billion rupees ($3.7 billion) of new capital in the next financial year towards a sector-wide bailout that the government estimates will cost $26 billion over four years.
Stressed loans -- those that have already turned bad and those seen at risk of doing so -- amount to 8 trillion Indian rupees ($119 billion), or 11.25 percent of total loans, Sinha said on Friday.
A recent surge in bad loans at state-run lenders after their regulator ordered a clean-up has led rating agencies to suggest banks will need more capital support from the government to cover losses and meet Basel III global banking rules.
More than two-dozen state-run lenders account for over two-thirds of India's banking assets and some 85 percent of troubled loans in the financial sector.
(Reuters)
